Author

Rebecca Tarlau

Rebecca Tarlau is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Education at Stanford University. Her research and organizing has focused on the relationship between social movements, the state, and education. She has spent the past decade examining the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), a national social movement of rural workers struggling for agrarian reform. This research explores the movement’s attempt to transform public education across the country, focusing on the micro-politics of grassroots educational reform: the strategies activists use to convince state actors to adopt their initiatives and the political and economic conditions that affect state-society interactions concerning schools.

Rebecca Tarlau reviews Jonathan Smucker’s Hegemony How-To, and argues that in addition to building stronger working-class, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-imperialist movements in the United States, the political alignment we build should be international, connecting with the many other working-class groups that are fighting against the same oppressive political and economic system.

How do relationships between left-leaning political parties and social movements change over time? Rebecca Tarlau looks at the case of the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) and the Workers’ Party (PT), examining the complexity of state-society relations — asking whether social movements can be “prefigurative” while still contesting state power.

The Berkeley Journal of Sociology is run by a collective of graduate students from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. It seeks to contribute to the “history of the present” by publishing critical sociological perspectives on current social, economic, political, and environmental issues.